With Tony Blair renewing his tough comments on Iran there’s now a betting market from the US-focused Dublin betting exchange, Tradesports, on whether there will be US and/or Israeli air-strikes against Iran. There are three options and the opening prices are:-

9.1-14.8 that there will be an ” an overt Air Strike against Iran by 30 June 06″.

12.6-24.5 that there will be “an overt Air Strike against Iran by 30 December 06”.

15.8-34.9 that there will be “an overt Air Strike against Iran by 31 March 07”.

These price ares based on chances out of 100 – so the market view of an attack by the first quarter of 2007 is about 2-1.

These issues are almost too important to consider betting on – but if relations continued to deteriorate then the most likely first military step would be a bombing strike.

Certainly, as we saw with Tony Blair’s comments yesterday, the rhetoric is being stepped up on both sides of the Atlantic. But there was no threat of military action in his comments. Instead he said Iran was a “quite a different country from Iraq in many, many ways..It may well be the change in Iran comes from within ultimately”

SITE NEWS Within the next week or so we are upgrading the software that we use which hopefully will be more robust. We are also going to restore our “latest comments” facility which eats into our server capacity and brought the site down during the Tory Conference. Also changing will be the line-up of pictures in our masthead. The current plan is:-

OUT WILL go Michael Howard, Boris Johnson, George Bush and Lembit Opik.

IN WILL COME David Cameron, George Osborne, Angela Merkel and one other.

Any ideas or suggestions. I cannot recall why we included Lembit and Boris in the first place. One suggestion is that we should include Saddam to represent the huge impact that Iraq has had on the politics of the world.